The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
By Kathy Highcove, San Fernando Branch
This article originally appeared in the February 2020 edition of the Valley Scribe, the newsletter of the San Fernando Branch.
Last month, SFV member Ray deTournay sent me the winning samples of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I’d never heard of this literary contest, but Ray often sends me interesting material, so I checked it out. Then I read the contest’s winning entries, and laughed a lot. So … I invite those of you with a nerdy lit sense of humor to browse through the contest’s website. And read some perfectly horrible and hilarious writing … And BTW, the following text is copied from Wiki.
The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (BLFC) is a tongue-in-cheek contest, held annually and sponsored by the English Department of San Jose State University in San Jose, California. Entrants are invited “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels” – that is, deliberately bad.
According to the official rules, the prize for winning the contest is “a pittance”. The 2008 winner received $250, while the 2014 winners’ page said the grand prize winner received “about $150”. The contest was started in 1982 by Professor Scott E. Rice of the English Department at San Jose State University and is named for English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-quoted first line “It was a dark and stormy night.” This opening, from the 1830 novel Paul Clifford, continues:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
The first year of the competition attracted just three entries, but it went public the next year, received media attention, and attracted 10,000 entries. There are now several subcategories, such as detective fiction, romance novels, Western novels, and purple prose. Sentences that are notable but not quite bad enough to merit the Grand Prize or a category prize are awarded Dishonorable Mentions.
If you also have a lit-nerdy sense of humor, you might check out their website and read some winning paragraphs of dreadful writing (https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2019).
Here’s a sampling:
2019 Grand Prize
“Space Fleet Commander Brad sat in silence, surrounded by a slowly dissipating cloud of smoke, maintaining the same forlorn frown that had been fixed upon his face since he’d accidentally destroyed the phenomenon known as time, thirteen inches ago. –
Maxwell Archer, Mt Pleasant, Ontario, Canada.”
Also from the website: “The official deadline is April 15 (a date that Americans associate with painful submissions and making up bad stories). The actual deadline is June 30. Winners are typically announced in August depending on our panel of undistinguished judges. The contest accepts submissions every day of the livelong year.”